The Museum of Eterna's Novel

CHAPTER V

Sweetheart: “What do we have today in ‘La Novela?’”

Maybegenius: “Whatever you like.”

“Today we have each other.”

“So we have Sweetheart’s happiness.”

“And the President’s. Let him be happy for at least a day.”

“But look, Sweetheart, here’s the lady who’s visiting.”

“Black eyes; she’s lovely; sad; she’s serious, and attractive. How many of us are sad, Maybegenius! Of course she has black eyes. She is tilting ever so gently.”

“What do you mean of course black eyes? No doctor could predict that a future newborn of course has black eyes. I predict that your blue eyes are the best and blackest, if that’s what you’d like.”

“If she sent a letter first, it’s because they already knew each other.”

“They might know each other, but as sure as there are good stories waiting to be told, if you ask him what color eyes she has, he won’t know.”

“You’re wrong about everything, thinker; he’s very interested in her.”

“How preoccupied you are, Sweetheart! Your suffering is useless; he’s not interested in her at all: it must have to do with his plans for the novel.”

“And you’re wrong about something else: the first thing he observes in people is the color of their eyes and…”

“So there is more than one first thing?”

“And their voice.”

“So in these two first things you win.”

“Don’t criticize my grammar, Maybegenius.”

“Your eyes are made for listening to a good story.”

“You are such a joker, Maybegenius!”

“On the contrary, Sweetheart, I’m heartbroken. I feel the dizziness of existing only in writing, when I could be here not in writing but in reality; this kind of engulfment is like what the film projector imposes on characters when it first of all projects the moment that they fall into a kiss, and then afterwards it has to withdraw them from sight. Tell our gentleman author, Sweetheart, that we should only exist in writing when we’re in pain.”

“Everyone’s sad!… but I will say that you just complimented me for the first time.”

“I’m in love, and I want life now, the life that is mechanically erased for cinema characters, when they should be given life in novels. In this, novels are sublimely superior to the cinema. I’m in love and I want life now that this love will make me happy; and so it’s with fear that I think perhaps now the novelist will raise his pen from the paper and stop. Anyway, do you want me to keep complimenting you? Your mouth…”

“Your own mouth should admit that the first compliment was mine, since a minute ago I told you that you’re an agreeable person, and good.”

“Now I’m really leaving: here’s Señorita Petrona’s carriage, with the legitimate cargo of her personage.”

And so they parted.

THE WATCH STOPS TICKING

Sweetheart: “Reader, I need you to breathe on this breathless page. Lean in more; all existence is so sad. Sweetheart is sad today.” Reader: “I’ll trade my leaden earth for your levity! Why so pensive, Sweetheart?”

“Maybe because all feeling is sadness.”

“Would that my life was worth lending you, was character-worthy!”

“It’s enough that we each think of each other.”

A SALUTE FROM THE CYPRESS

In the afternoon, while the foliage and the dusty ground make the initial music of a summer rain, the President, alone in the estancia, hears the desperate appeal of the Past interrupt his conscience: his soul clamors to recapture those nights at home spent in contemplation, aware of each respiration of the five beings in the filial home, all together under a single roof. Everyone was asleep, and leaving his desk in search of these beloved figures, bodies denounced for bedclothes, heads, hands. Could he be more gripped by the past?

ONE OF THE FIVE "LOOSE PAGES IN THE NOVEL"

The lady mentioned in the conversation between Sweetheart and Maybegenius was the august woman to whom the President directed himself for six years before the following letter, as careless in its redaction as it is ardent in tone, because of the agitation of those days of his life:

Buenos Aires, July 1923

To Eterna.

I can’t go a single moment without thinking of you.

I can’t quite grasp what impulses motivated your conduct towards me since the telephone call on Friday at two, which is to say Saturday morning, remember? Until today.

I have been tenderly but energetically chastised by the valiance and sensitivity of a great woman, peerless among those I have known, discreet, pious, active, pure — and my pride has not suffered. Before, yes, the rage I felt at losing everything, unsure of my attraction and calmed, in those days, waylaid by your constant kindness, not by infatuation but by the insidiousness of trust, of faith in the joy that possessed us and then suddenly went numb, I was humbled whenever I enjoyed your company; only fear ruled my conduct, faced with this first admonition of your lips; pride had nothing to do with it. From the moment I met you, the difference in worth and grace between us came to the fore, and I lived timidly, entirely submitting myself to the hour in which I would, in my inferiority, not win you, but lose you. I will consider nothing else now except what of you I might lose, perhaps even the sight of you; injury or flattery are now nothing to me.

Saturday night you showed me an evasiveness, a tormenting attitude in your constant clarity of tone and gesture, and your unfailing, inscrutable spontaneity. But I had already buried all my hopes, buried my heart, as the Spanish say, ever since the telephone communication of Saturday at dawn.

All the things you so cordially spoke about in the days we were together seem so different to me now. I enjoyed the profound goodness of our exchange for so many weeks and now those days are over! Perhaps there will never be another time like this for us.

I came again to your house on Sunday night, with the last day as an intimate illusion. The only thing I had, as I crossed your threshold, was this terror of even the most imperceptible shuttering of your manner. And you were waiting for me, and you confided in me and offered me again the precious consideration that enchants each daydream instant with you. I knew then that you had recently called my telephone; I was in constant agitation; I waited long moments in the vestibule before you received me, you received me with flowers, much more out of passion than charity, an unmerited abnegation given that, as you yourself said, no future can begin there.

What a dark hour we had, and what I couldn’t grasp then was how you, too, were suffering. I was and am unjust, and I have been, in this ennobling attachment, the freer and happier of the two.

No rebellion was ever born of this memory, and nothing is left of my pride, nor do I want any pride to remain, where you or your memory reside. I only want holiness to reign in my thoughts and treatment of Eterna. One day I can hope that my spirit will be possessed of such powers that I will trade this phrase, which now and for a long time has defined the feeling of our sympathetic exchange, for something limitless.

But I will wait for so long, and so quietly, that maybe you’ll disquiet yourself, be injured by my mute suffering, and, generous as always — or perhaps, as is my fervent desire, touched by passion — humble in your tenderness, not out of pity but out of delight, you’ll venture to give yourself to the fullness of the immense feeling of identification, of love — and you, ardent woman, will be the first to speak.

You who suffered the most and toiled the hardest, who is more and gives more, who teaches yet has nothing to learn, nothing distant in your soul, ever

Eterna

And the truth is, Eterna, that in those days there was a world of things to discover in you. One word from you on the telephone in the last of Saturday’s dawn was the first announcement — because of its tone, and when it was said, not because of its cold reception — of the flight of our happiness. How much more disillusionment must you have suffered by my errors and defects!

I think I know; and I am drawn, as in a nightmare, to name them all.

It had to be this way. No man can be great before you, nor can he ever hope to be, having come to you, unless he learns it from you. And even so: I wanted to learn, not invent, my holiness of passion. I hoped for everything from passion, I lived until today without it, and without wanting to prepare myself for it, only wanting to learn passion under torment, hopeless of any comparison with the beauty of spirit I would some day encounter. And even now, knowing passion, I live more for your pardon than for martyrdom, purification, faith in myself; I lived in the happiness of knowing a living Beauty, definite as a model of my virtue.

What a pious and august concern has been yours in these two days!

What depth of being you demonstrated, forgoing everything you cared about so as to spare me the pain you were bound to inflict.

I trusted in your forgiveness, before, and nothing more. And now: I believe it is I who suffers most. What a lightning bolt you were!

Forgive me.

Graces are reflected in your action: tenderness, energy, sensitivity, tact — even in these days, in the intricacy of such consternation, you have not abandoned them, nor your fantasy, nor the subtle mischief in your manner. These graces exceed everything I put in the little poem “You Went In The Night, Sad and Adorned,” when I told you that I could not guess at you, could not reach you.

I didn’t believe I knew so little of you, and that someone would teach me, and that I would grow in this way.

While you may believe that I’m tormented by love itself and have lost hope in any reciprocation of affection, I surprise myself alone, and I humiliate myself in measuring the delicate care for me that has so quickly been born in the heights of your sentiment. It shames me to think I didn’t see the growth of your feeling: I condemn this coarseness in my own feelings, and betray that which I don’t believe I deserve.

You’ll understand, then, why I had lost hope when the first warning sounded, when, fighting against yourself, you resolved to shatter my illusion.

As little hope as I had when our involvement began, I have conducted myself as a common cad in my conception of the fullness of our destiny. And it wasn’t caddishness but enchantment, and faith in the fortunes of Passion.

Something concrete must have intervened, not for you to change, since you’ve always managed to get me accustomed to the mobility of your sentiments towards me. But I’m already ashamed of analyzing these occurrences, what came out of our few exchanges.

You suffer no more, sensitive creature, if with such grateful happiness for my reappearance and, having retaken that lost path towards our existential communion in all its vicissitudes, the other day you showed yourself so jubilant and anxious for the reconciliation of our two lives. I return to you forever, and, impelled by the fear incurred by the grave risk I escaped, I accept these limits that you impose as inescapable.

Eterna!

The author: Here I have a letter that, it must be said, no great author of a great novel like this one would have written so poorly, with such excessive and sentimental language.

The President, apparently unconcerned, never thought it badly written, and in this I have the argument against novel characters writing private letters (since it’s obvious that this is a private correspondence that’s not intended for the reading public, since all the information needed to understand it and guess its outcome are missing, except for the person who already knows everything it’s going to say and might even decline to read it, which is a very sensible abstinence, considering that the lover — it can’t be concealed that the President is a lover, even though he expresses himself with a maximum of confusion in that regard — allows his letters to arrive at the beloved’s house as if he hadn’t really bothered himself to write them; he could have just burned them afterwards, telling his beloved when he sees her: “I wrote you a splendid letter that pleased me very much, but naturally I didn’t send it to you because it was only an exercise in literary agility.”

And then Eterna would ask the President every time she saw him, “Did you write me any letters?”).

In the preceding letter, the President alludes for the first time (though doubtlessly he did so frequently in his secret conversations in the novel) to his telephonic communications with Eterna. (The way to achieve a purely oral conversation without vision or gesture is to talk on the telephone in the dark.)

It’s true. They talked at length every evening, and Eterna always ended with a little song that sounded like the defiant, sobbing cry of a little girl who hasn’t gotten her way, to which the President would respond: “I want to do what I want. Give me this, and pamper me a lot until I fall asleep, so that I can dream of how much I like you, and how the one I love thinks of me and dreams of me.”

“I haven’t learned how to do it yet; tomorrow I’ll be better.”

“But today makes yet another day without perfect love; one more irreparable day. No, the past is not irreversible, this is what you always say.”

“Yes, there is every reason to Hope: when the days of perfect love number more than the days of turpitude, oblivion, laziness, and apprenticeship, the past is as nothing.”

“And after that you change again?”

“No, perfect love lasts an eternity.”

“No pity, no pity, President. No pity. The false lover is he who pities, or who asks for its recourse. Love is equality.”

THE MOMENT WHEN, AS THEY GO TO BED AFTER THIS INTERESTING CHAT, EVERYONE IS TROUBLED BY PROBLEMS THAT PERHAPS SLEEP WILL RESOLVE

President: Hallucination of the past, with its culmination in the Novel; a situation and a scene has equal power over feelings that have changed, like tyranny, or confusion.

Eterna: Absolute oblivion; oblivion in favor of a great present; oblivion of the person with whom one speaks, whom one regards.

Sweetheart: We want different things, sometimes we put on the light, sometimes we put it out; to see and not to see; let them see us, let’s see each other; let’s not.

Maybegenius: A test of the novelist’s art; to traverse the emotional state of a boxer at the ten count.

The Lover: The struggle between a present passion, a present beloved (her image), and the memory of a dead person.

Unlike his friends, Simple is not troubled by personal or imaginary — but more or less distant, idealized — problems; he has to honor the trust placed in him, his suitability to resolve this problem: with the perfumed smoke left over from forced smokers, cinema actors make an Illusion of Eterna, to cover up for their terrible gestures: just as the Lover must weave his own Hopes.

Author: You, reader, since now you may enter my pages, lose yourself and liberate yourself from reality and from these problems, since it’s just as worthwhile to stay in the real or to believe yourself real, if you’re like me and half the rest of humanity (the whole other half is devoted to altruism, since it’s just as easy to be good as it is to be evil, that’s why, if you notice, you’ll see that good people, even saints, don’t even realize what they are. (If Leopardi had known this, how many tear-soaked rants over humanity’s evils would we have been spared. (I’ll speak parenthetically about parenthesis: I’ve ordered parentheses of two sizes to be made (I don’t know why boring but emphatic literature, almost always written by grammarians, zealots, or artists, repudiates the emphatic parenthesis of the second order and yet makes use of two or three hundred adjectives; which is to say, organization of that instrument, the Word in lexicon and syntax as if they were steel workers forging palettes without thinking themselves artists by this action) you, reader, want the best for all humanity, and you tremble at the thought of its suffering. That’s why you hope that each character will resolve his problems tonight and wake in the morning with his mind as easy as his heart.

Reader: That’s so. Oh, if I could be a fly on the wall for your conversations, and in this way know for even an hour what it is to be a character! Who in “La Novela” does not breathe life?

Sweetheart, who seems to hear this echo of Life: To breathe, this rising and falling of the chest; ours don’t respire, and this blanching and blushing of lovers’ cheeks. Only think of the nothing that you and I both are, President.

Some want life, others want art. Only the Lover is happy the way he is. (Struggle between the author and the reader; the author wants to pull the reader towards the fading away of his being in character. The reader wants it, but he doesn’t dare to renounce life forever, he’s afraid to be spellbound by the novel. He doesn’t know that he who enters “La Novela” never returns.)

Author: I shouldn’t say to the reader, “Come into my novel,” but rather save him from life indirectly. My quest is that every reader should enter my novel and lose himself in it; the novel will take him in, bewitch him, empty him out. The first reader who was exiled from himself and fell in the thin air of my novel (this happened while reading page 14) was a twenty-three-year-old student who fell softly into the pages, racking his brains to follow me and to identify himself. He smoked as he read, and sometimes I’d be concerned when some hot ash fell into my pages: but in time he too fell, relieved and thankfully not smoking, into languid oblivion. He very much loved, a bothersome coquette, fickle but affectionate. He was exhausted.

Reader: And I’m not?

Author: Maybe. I hear light steps; I sense a mischievous shadow on this page. You’re here too, Welcome.

Simple: Let’s make a pavilion at “La Novela” for spellbound readers.

New reader: I anxiously wait my turn to descend into the pages of the novel. Am I not there yet?

Maybegenius: Reader, are you truly the one reading, or does the author now read you, giving that he speaks to you, or at the representation of you that he has before him, and that he knows you like he knows a character?

Reader: I’m not interested in whoever I might be; this delicious dizziness is enough to bring me into the subtle orbit of the novel.